I went through the basic start up today again (check in and out, and newscast). Then we had 8th grade Social Studies classes come through all day to work on a Civil War project. They worked in groups of 3 and needed to do research on a specific topic (different for each group) to create a poster to present to the class on Wednesday. They had today and tomorrow to work on the research and create the poster. Marian explained the library rules (for those that were sure to break them) and the tools they would use for the lesson. The teacher explained the lesson and created the groups then Marian and I walked around to help out if they needed it and explain things they didn't understand.
Some students were studying the assassination and were creating a newspaper about that day. Others created maps of the battles or of cities. One group wanted to make a song about a battle. It was really interesting to see the different creative ways of the groups.
The groups were very hard to keep on task though (a common theme). We often leave this up to the teacher because we didn't want to step on her toes. There were a number of kids that were very disrespectful and she needed to take them into the office to talk to them. I learned by the end that this was to help them and that if they were overly rude I did not need to help them since I was volunteering. I wondered what to do in this situation as the librarian, but thought I would work with the teacher to perhaps tell them they had to create a project on their own if they couldn't behave.
This day was mainly for research so they should have been concentrating on reading the material and taking notes, unfortunately I have found that they don't realize that is what they should be doing until it is too late.
I kept walking around reminding them of "who, what, where, why, when and how" to keep them on task. I found a lot of students don't know to use the index to find what they were looking for.
As a last note, what I learned is that the teacher should have talked to the students on Friday to set up the lesson. Five minutes could have created the groups and explained what they were supposed to do on Monday so that they only needed a reminder. She also hid a lot towards the end of the day, as if she had given up dealing with them. This was hard on us to keep motivated towards helping the students. If I were the librarian in this situation, I would have taken the time to let her know about talking to them earlier, as well ask asked for more support towards the end of the day.
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